I just packed four more boxes of books. I now have six total. I figured out it’s half as cheap to mail them book rate than to put them on the moving truck, so that will be a fun day at the post office.

As I went through my bookcase I found my collection of “Murder Can Be Fun” fanzines. This was a great zine from the 1990s, based here in SF, and full of nothing but stories of freak accidents, bizarre murders, and other true crime, all of it written from a comedic angle. Loved that zine. Glad I still have them all. “Death at Disneyland” was a good issue.

Anyway, hidden within this stack was a copy of “Hex” #4, yes, my own zine. This one came out in spring of 1996. It was fantastically printed with a full color cover and extremely high-quality black and white pages within. This was the period when I had my Kinko’s graveyard shift hookup — my old friend Lisa. I would drive over the bridge at midnight and stay until dawn working on this thing.

This was a good issue, short and sweet. But I am still amazed at how candid I was, almost daring someone to accuse me of talking shit. This was right after I made a trip back to Olympia for a visit, and so there is a whole story within about how much I fuckin hated that place. I never named any names, of course, but I basically said the town was full of hipsters and assholes. Which it was, but still. Ballsy of me, no?

This was also a period when I was heavy into Britpop and was about to leave the US for the first time for my first trip to England. I had been fetishizing the place since high school so this was a pretty big deal. But all that is discussed in issue five.

Here is some stuff I wrote when I was twenty-three:

“I remember walking across the roof of the State Theater some May day ages ago at dusk, drinking hot chocolate and picking up sea shells… Wandering the frosty streets of Olympia in the middle of the night with a paper bag of beer, sitting in a cavernous parking garage, typing on my Royal just to hear the hollow hammer of the keys on paper. And looking across the pavement to see him facing me doing the same thing on the typewriter we found behind the thrift shop. If I don’t think about him breaking my heart a few weeks later, things like this stay as sweet as candy.”

I think reading this old issue has solidified something that has been on my mind this week with regard to the novel I am writing.

I can’t use a made-up, fictionalized town. That is the coward’s way; a lie. I have to be truthful, which ironically is one of the more important things about writing fiction. So, Olympia it is. Damn the torpedoes.